It was 20 years ago today

Trying to make sense of Polish politics today is no easy task for the outside observer. Of course, governments come and go; one set of ministers is substituted by another; parliamentary majorities change like shifting sands. But what is less visible is that which is the real cleavage of Polish politics and society, 12 years into an admittedly weak and fragile democracy. It is the answer to the simple question: What did you do, 20 years ago, on the morning of Dec. 13, 1981?

On that day, Polish soldiers, and after them, hordes of communist secret police operatives, took to the streets to crush Solidarity, the movement that for a brief 16 months had brought if not democracy, then at least an oasis of freedom into a country that at the time was still a central pillar of the Soviet bloc. The man responsible for the imposition of martial law, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, is today a free citizen, and although he is arraigned on a series of charges concerning his involvement in the massacre of dozens of shipyard workers a decade earlier, in 1970, few doubt that he will go to his grave without a final legal judgment to his name. Moreover, a recent opinion poll revealed that about half of today's Poles believe that the imposition of martial law was a justifiable action, on the grounds that it prevented Poland's invasion by the Soviet Union and a bloody crushing of anti-communist resistance on the level of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Finally, a close look at the government of Prime Minister Leszek Miller reveals many individuals who, at one level or another, were directly involved on the communist side during those cold December days. Does that mean that now, 20 years later, that the events then carry no weight in Polish politics?

Only superficially. Last week, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski made a speech that he earlier described as one of the most important in his life, at the Institute of National Remembrance, which exposed the extent to which Poland's political psyche is still fundamentally torn by the memories of those events. He said that there was no doubt that imposing martial law in Poland was evil, wasting people's enthusiasm and hopes that have never been regained since. Kwaśniewski paid tribute to victims of martial law, among others, to miners from the Wujek colliery who were shot by the militia, to what he referred as the most tragic event of that time. The president also expressed gratitude on the part of Polish Republic to the Catholic Church for its role during martial law.

Although the speech was later criticized by many opposition politicians, even those like Władysław Frasyniuk, leader of the Freedom Union (UW) party whose public image has been of leniency toward former communists, it revealed the extent to which the divisions of the past remain a political reality today. It is well known that many, if not most, of Poland's public institutions are staffed according to strict political lines. State-owned media, state-owned companies, as well as sundry agencies are the subject of political purges at every change of government, according to criteria that can be boiled down to whether those sacked or retained are "one of us." And what is the criterion used? Although political distinctions blur before and after the 1980-1981 period, where one declared one's loyalties on that December night remains the key to understanding the fundamental division in Polish politics. Even those politicians born after 1981 - and there are already a few - find their political home according to their stance and interpretation of those events. It is on the fingers of one hand that one can count those politicians who have crossed the divide. On the current opposition side, Andrzej Olechowski, a leader of the Civic Platform (PO), was part of the communist intelligence machine in the 1980s, and the current culture minister in the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) government was an active supporter of Solidarity. But their former political friends and colleagues treat them as pariahs and traitors.

The truth is that this totemic date defines politicians today, and explains why Poland still has a long way to go before it becomes a normally functioning democracy in the Western sense. In most Western European societies, political systems, even if they were established out of bloody conflicts, were ones in which all the establishment elites had a uniform perspective on the past. Take Germany: after World War II, albeit as the result of several years of allied occupation, West Germany was established on the basis of an across-the-board rejection of the Nazi past, both in strict political as well as constitutional terms. In Spain, King Juan Carlos - although himself a by-product of the Franco regime - has been the pillar of Spanish democracy on the basis of a public rejection of Spain's flirtation with authoritarianism. And although Vichy continues to be the subject of an unresolved historical debate - and despite the fact that President Francois Mitterand was himself a child of Petain - at least France went through a period immediately after the war of a reckoning with German collaborators.

In the case of Poland, the sad truth is that the political elites of the country have still to undergo such a process of mutual reckoning of the past. Not only have just a tiny number of those guilty of perpetrating repression, torture, and even murder, been brought to justice, but the passage of time is increasingly blurring the distinction between those who defended liberty and those who actively conspired to crush it. Kwaśniewski's speech last week, although in the eyes of some half-hearted - the president claimed that without martial law, there would not be the conditions for the establishment of democracy 10 years later - is at least an acknowledgement that this remains to be done. Brave although it was, it merely underlined the fact of deep political and historical divisions that can only be healed by those who perpetrated the communist crimes of the past admitting that they did wrong. As Poland enters the 13th year of democracy, the prospect of future political stability and popular legitimacy of the current political establishment depends increasingly on whether this final moral reckoning will be undertaken by those who aspire to be the political representatives of the Polish people.

Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed on director@cec.com.pl

Marek Matraszek